KDE 2.1-Beta2 Is Out

Coinciding with the start of the LinuxWorld Expo here in New York, the KDE Team has announced today that KDE 2.1-beta2 is ready for your enjoyment. The attached press release goes into the details (and I can't help but throw in this cool screenshot of the new Konqueror splash page), and lists a number of pre-compiled packages. This all in prelude to the scheduled release of KDE 2.1 in mid-February. So what are you waiting for -- startcha 'loadin'. Update: 02/02 10:39 AM by N: Link to Debian packages now included.

 

DATELINE JANUARY 31, 2001

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Beta KDE Release for Linux Desktop Ships

New Beta Version of Leading Linux Desktop Offers New Theme
Manager, Image Viewer and IDE

January 31, 2001 (The INTERNET). The KDE
Team
today announced the release of KDE 2.1-beta2, a powerful, modular,
Internet-enabled desktop. KDE 2.1 constitutes the second major release of
the KDE 2 series, which is the next generation of the
award-winning KDE 1
series. KDE is the work product of hundreds of dedicated developers
originating from over 30 countries.

This is the last planned beta release before the scheduled release of
KDE 2.1 on February 19, 2001. KDE 2.1 offers a number of additions,
enhancements and fixes over KDE 2.0.1, the last stable KDE release which
shipped on December 5, 2000. The major additions and improvements are:

  • Konqueror, the modular,
    standards-compliant file
    manager and web browser, has improved significantly:
    • It can now be
      configured
      to provide thumbnail previews for
      text and HTML
      files
      .
    • KHTML,
      the HTML widget, now has a special 'transitional mode' which greatly improves
      its handling of malformed HTML pages.
    • In additon, KHTML now has greatly
      improved Java support. Support for Java security (JDK 1.2 or
      compatible is now required) as well as Java over SSL using the JSSE classes
      have been added.
    • Drag'n'drop has been improved; now a URL can be dropped on a web page
      and the Location label can be dragged.
    • "Favorite icon" support has been added, for displaying a website's icon
      in the Location bar, in bookmarks and in the taskbar.
    • Devices can be displayed in the directory view and mounted on demand.
    • File-name completion has been improved and in-place file renaming
      added.
    • Additional protocols supported include a LAN browser (lan:/ and rlan:/), a
      floppy browser (floppy:/) and a CD browser (cd:/), which includes
      CDDB support.
    • It now stores bookmarks
      using the standard XBEL
      bookmark format
      ; a new bookmark editor complements the new standard.
    • Auto-proxy configuration and support for proxies requiring
      authentication have been implemented.
  • KDevelop, a C/C++ integrated
    development environment, has been added to the core KDE distribution. The
    version being shipped, 1.4beta2, is the first version of KDevelop to
    make use of the KDE 2 libraries and integrate completely with the KDE 2
    desktop.
  • A new and much-anticipated theme manager, as well as a LILO configuration
    tool, have been added to KControl, the KDE control panel. The control panel
    now lists all available I/O slaves.
  • Many icons have been improved. In addition, semi-transparency
    (alpha-blending) has been implemented on small images and icons.
  • The panel (Kicker) has enjoyed significant improvements.
    An external taskbar has been included (familiar to
    KDE 1 users), support for sub-panels has been added (which can be separately
    sized and positioned), an improved external pager (Kasbar) has been added,
    and support for applets has been improved (including support for
    WindowMaker dock applets).
  • ARts, the KDE 2 multimedia
    architecture, now offers a control module to configure sampling rate and
    output devices, increased performance, improved user interfaces and a
    number of additional effects and filters.
  • Pixie, an image viewer/editor, has been added to the Graphics package.
  • KAB, the KDE address book, now provides regular expression searching
    of the address database and can export the database to HTML files.
  • For developers, a number of classes have been added to the core
    libraries, including a class for undo/redo support (KCommand) and
    a class for editing list boxes (KEditListBox).
  • Many additional improvements, particularly to KMail, the mail client,
    and KNode, the news reader. A more complete list of changes is
    available
    here.

KDE 2.1-beta2 includes the core KDE libraries, the core desktop environment,
as well as the over 100 applications from the other
standard base KDE packages: Administration, Games, Graphics, Multimedia,
Network, Personal Information Management (PIM), Toys and Utilities. In
addition, this release includes the development packages KDevelop, Bindings,
an SDK and Documentation.
KOffice is not included in this release.

All of KDE 2.1-beta2 is available for free under an Open Source license.
Likewise,
Trolltech's Qt 2.2.x, the GUI
toolkit on which KDE is based,
is also available for free under two Open Source licenses: the
QPublic License and the GNU
General Public License
.

A more complete
list of
major changes
, a FAQ about
the release
and the
KDE
2.1 release plan
are available at the KDE
website. More information about KDE 2
is available in a
slideshow
presentation
and on
KDE's web site, including a number of
screenshots,
developer
information
and a developer's
KDE 1 - KDE 2 porting guide.

Downloading and Compiling KDE

The source packages for KDE 2.1-beta2 are available for free download at
http://ftp.kde.org/unstable/distribution/2.1beta2/tar/generic/src/ or in the
equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp server
mirrors. KDE 2.1-beta2 requires
qt-2.2.1, which is available from the above locations under the name
qt-x11-2.2.1.tar.gz,
although
qt-2.2.3
is recommended. KDE 2.1-beta2 will not work with versions of Qt older
than 2.2.1.

For further instructions on compiling and installing KDE, please consult
the installation
instructions
and, if you encounter problems, the
compilation FAQ.

Installing Binary Packages

Some distributors choose to provide binary packages of KDE for certain
versions of their distribution. Some of these binary packages for KDE 2.1-beta2
will be available for free download under
http://ftp.kde.org/unstable/distribution/2.1-beta2/rpm/
or under the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp server
mirrors. Please note that the
KDE team is not responsible for these packages as they are provided by third
parties -- typically, but not always, the distributor of the relevant
distribution.

KDE 2.1-beta2 requires qt-2.2.1, the free version of which is available
from the above locations usually under the name qt-x11-2.2.1, although
qt-2.2.3 is recommended. KDE 2.1-beta2 will not work with versions of Qt
older than 2.2.1.

At the time of this release, pre-compiled packages are available for:

Please check the servers periodically for pre-compiled packages for other
distributions. More binary packages will become available over the
coming days and weeks.

About KDE

KDE is an independent, collaborative project by hundreds of developers
worldwide to create a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop environment
employing a component-based, network-transparent architecture.
KDE is working proof of the power of the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software
development model to create first-rate technologies on par with
and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

For more information about KDE, please visit KDE's
web site.

Trademarks Notices.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Unix is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
Trolltech and Qt are trademarks of Trolltech AS.
Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contacts:

United States:

Kurt Granroth
[email protected]
(1) 480 732 1752 
Andreas Pour
[email protected]
(1) 718 456 1165

Europe (French and English):

David Faure
[email protected]
(44) 1225 837409

Europe (English and German):

Martin Konold
[email protected]
(49) 179 2252249

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by Eron Lloyd (not verified)

There is some work being done to address this - we can only hope that "the involved" decide to go through with it. It would be a great thing, indeed. Someone had mentioned on a previous posting about breaking the packages up - some of them, like kdenetwork, may be a little large if the user just want email and Internet dialer, but not any of the others. I agree, we need an equivalent.

by ac (not verified)

I recently tried KDE 2.0.1 by installing some RPMS I think I found on ftp.kde.org. All the improvements are pretty amazing I must say. However, one odd thing was the sample sound effects provided. In particular, the startup sound effect is the same as Windows 98 afaik. I don't know if somebody just copied it from their Windows filesystem but regardless, I think KDE shouldn't copy/steal such stuff from Windows. In the worst case, Microsoft would be pissed of at people borrowing their sound effects.

by anonymous coward (not verified)

I don't know where you've got your rpms from, but the sounds are normally NOT the same. Really!

I must admit, though, that I do not really like them. Then again, KDE probably doesn't have the resources to hire a symphony orchestra for a startup-sound :)

by Niklas Lönnbro (not verified)

The startup sound for Windows 95 seems to have been composed by Brian Eno - check out properties for The Microsoft sound.wav. Actually, I still like it, it's better than the w98 startup noise and, yes, in my opinion better than the KDE 2.01 startup sound. Why don't somebody ask Brian Eno if he is interested in helping out, for a good cause? He might even be featured in the next OSS movie, the one about KDE... ;-)

by Nicholas Hagen (not verified)

Anyone know where that Konqueror splash startup page is located? I use KDE from current CVS so it never loads like that.

by anonymous coward (not verified)

try about:konqueror, that should work!

by Pedro Ziviani (not verified)

KDE 2.1 beta 2 looks great and it's rock solid on my Mandrake 7.2. The support to WindowMaker applets through the Dock Application bar works fine and I have it on my screen all the time loaded with many applets. However there's one very annoying bug on it: every time I load a Java application, it "docks" into the Application Dock when it obviously shouldn't, making it impossible to use them. I currently have to close the Dock in order to load Java apps and then load the Dock again afterwards. Has anyone else experienced this same bug?

Beta2 absolutely rocks!! I'm coming from 2.0.1 (which I already liked a lot) and the improvements that made it into beta2 are totally mind-blowing! Konqueror for example... hardly any page now that doesn't render correctly, JavaScript and Java work (most of the time), a super-slick styling... Wow! This is the future of UNIX/Linux web browsing!
The panel... now, after all the complaining, you gave us THREE different ways to have an external taskbar on our desktop. I chose to start a child panel with only the taskbar enabled. Cool.

And there's so much more and it's listed on the HP anyway.

You guys totally rock!! I can't over how great this Beta is!

One minor oddity though: I installed the RH7.0 packages and some of the RPMs depend on an arts-2.1 package. I thought aRts was included in kdelibs and kdemultimedia? I force-installed w/out the packages and had no sound. I then got an arts RPM from Rawhide (some 2.0 unstable snapshot) and now everything seems to work. But I'm quite sure the installation wasn't intented to work like this, so please, what's the deal here?

Thanks
Jörg

by Martin A. (not verified)

Hi !
I wonder if anyone know how to insert
pictures into an e-mail in kmail.
I use this feature quite often with Netscape 6,
but haven't been able to do this with Kmail.
Thanks.

Martin

by Moritz Moeller-... (not verified)

TO do this you would need an HTML editor. But HTML mails are EVIL. SO at the moment I would not count on support. Why not just attach the picture?

by Martin (not verified)

Well, I think it's a bit more elegant to insert
the image directly into the e-mail, but if
this is a security threat, then it should not
be included in Kmail :)

Martin

by Dave (not verified)

Only its not a security threat. You are right it would be more elegant. However the attitude of text only emails is a hang over from pre-web days that some hackers still seem to have.

People want different fonts / colours and pictures in their email. Thats just the way it is

by Be4Truth (not verified)

If HTML mails are EVIL why did the Divine made them? Maybe women don't tempt computer geeks anymore so He made HTML emails .....

by kreppel (not verified)

are there plans implementing imap in kmail ?
it seems quite impossible (until aethera/magellan is finished) to find a decent mail client for kde now ...

by ac (not verified)

Yes there is, but the IMAP code wasn't ready soon enough to be released with KDE2.1, so they're releasing it separately later.

by Andras (not verified)

You can use also the current KMAIL with IMAP. :) Of course not alone, you need the fetchmail and procmail, get the mails through IMAP with fetchmail, put in a local directory, and set the KMail to read the mails from the local directory. This works until the native IMAP support comes out.

by Christian Parpart (not verified)

Hi all,

I've recognized that release a lot of days ago , downloaded it and was waiting for the release announcement on the web. But I was still waiting - until today. A bit late maybe, isn't it?

Regards,
Christian Parpart.

by Francisco Leon (not verified)

Announcements arent made until a few days later
so they have more time to do some internal
testing and allowing time for the mirrors to catch the files
Check out the kde 2.1 plan list

by Pete L (not verified)

The press release says that automatic proxy now works in Konqueror. But there's nothing about configuring it in the manual (guess that takes more time to update) and I can't seem to get it to work. Any ideas?

What's up guys?

Why can't you give deb's alongside all those rpm's ?
Ok, the debian guys gave you an hard time, but I think that you are the ones loosing with that atittude...

Daniel

For what I know about KDE, they just support the sources, all binaries, etc are from the distros.
For example, redhat packages are made by redhat people, mandrake are made by mandrake staff, and so goes...
I don't think it's a good politicy, but once is the onde KDE team use, we can't blame them for missing support for some system, but ask the guys who make the distro to support KDE.

I didn't know that.... Sorry for the rant, I thought the rpm's were made by KDE.

Daniel

by Roberto Alsina (not verified)

it says it right there:

"Installing Binary Packages: [...] Please note that the KDE team is not responsible for these packages as they are provided by third parties -- typically, but not always, the distributor of the relevant distribution."

You ain't getting no sympathy complaining in an article's forum without actually reading it ;-)

Debian is the most outdated distro there is, and it's very hard to find packages made for the
latest application. As you may know kde uses qt which at that time didn't have GPL so debian would not use kde, until woody.
Heck, there aren't even decent xfree 4 packages out there, just development packages
Blame Debian not Kde

There are Debian packages for KDE 2.1 in Debian - KDE just decided not to announce them, which is KDE's fault, not Debian's.

The fact that Debian stable is fairly outdated is irrelevant, as most people run Debian testing or Debian unstable. I do wonder what you mean by decent XFree 4 packages - I'm running Debian with decent XFree 4 packages right now. They are no more 'developmental' than those released with any other distribution.

I agree. As far as I know, the stuff in Debian's "unstable" directory is basically the same as the stuff that other distributions put out. Debian just won't trust trust the new stuff until it's proven its stability.

Wow!! I can't believe I just replied to a post from almost three months ago!!

by CiAsA Boark (not verified)

does anyone know how to get cd browsing support compiled into konqi? the release notes said that it now supports cd:/ to browse cds. typing cd:/ into the location bar of konqi makes it try to lookup cd:/ on realnames

here is the more detailed changelog:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelog2_0to2_1.html

btw, does anyone know how to turn off realnames support, its annoying.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Try:

audiocd:/

You need cdparanoia and a symbolic link /dev/cdrom helps

by Bojan (not verified)

For me this doesn't work either. I have cdparanoia and /dev/cdrom and I would really like to have this feature in my favourite browser.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Hmm... I don't use any distro-rpms. This is KDE2.1 compiled from CVS. But kcontrol has a new module:

information->KDE-ioslaves

Do you see "audiocd" ?

BTW - this feature would be realy nice if noatun (or arts) are able to play audiostreams.

by Bojan (not verified)

Yes, you are right. I don't see the audiocd ioslave. I installed RPM for Redhat 7.0 and obviously there is no audiocd ioslave compiled in there. Has anyone got any idea, how to include this?

by Henri (not verified)

Congratulations. It's really a wonderful job, everything runs smoothly and amazingly fast. I didn't find any bug yet ! Just some very minor package flows (why does kdepim rpm _require_ pilot-link, i don't have any palm though i would like to or conflict between I18N-French and kdevelop rpms). I don't want to flame at all, but KDE is now much ahead of gnome which doesn't seem as robust and coherent. Again, thank you guys !

by Ben Hall (not verified)

Hey there,

Deb packages have been available for days. As to the person claiming that Debian was the most out of date distro, (s)he obviously doesn't know what they're talking about.

So, here are the instructions:

add the lines to your /etc/apt/sources/list

Debian Potato (Stable)

deb http://kde.debian.net potato main crypto optional

Debian Woody (Unstable)

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free

In either case, once the line is added type:

apt-get update && apt-get install task-kde task-kde-devel

Wait a while for packages to DL and install, and poof! You've got KDE 2.1b2 (Woody is using 0128 builds at the moment.)

Debian Woody is awesome, I've got KDE 2.1, XFree 4.0.2 and all sorts of other really current stuff. As a side bonus, it's only slightly less stable than other Linux distro's. For servers, use stable.

Cheers,

Ben

by Gary (not verified)

I get "Couldn't find package task-kde".
using Woody...

by Carbon (not verified)

In the release notes, it says that koffice is not included! Why is that? Although i realize that it is not yet up to the stability level of staroffice, it would still be nice to see an evaluation of where it is so far without having to use CVS.

by Waldo Bastian (not verified)

Since 2.0 large parts of KOffice are being reworked and that will not be finished in time for 2.1.

Cheers,
Waldo

by Chris Adams (not verified)

Ive installed the Mandrake RPM's, and everything works great, i'm really impressed...
Apart from one thing...
Ive read that you can type lan:/ or rlan:/ in konqueror and get a listing of all the samba machines on your network.
when i type in lan:/ or rlan:/ , it trys to search for it on a search engine.
Why doe these not work????
Help!

Chris Adams

by Estevam Neto (not verified)

I'd like to install the rpms of kde 2.1 made by RedHat (Conectiva just make of final versions...), but I need kde-i18n-pt_BR.

by Jack the ripper (not verified)

Why does the Konqi screenshot have spelling and grammar mistakes? In fact, the whole of KDE is full of such mistakes, run-together words (what the hell is a Webbrowser, I ask the author of the user's guide), and other broken English. Geez, if you can't write English well enough, just write the messages in your native language and get someone else to translate them.

by Chris Adams (not verified)

Help!
I cant make konqi work by putting in lan:/
It just trys to search for it with Google.
I am using the Mandrake 7.2 binary rpms.
At the moment, I am compiling kdenetwork using an SRPM, I was just wondering if there was an easier way.

Chris Adams

by Luc Cove (not verified)

I'm in need of serious help. I'm a newbie to linux, and I just installed mandrake 8.2. What it is that I'm having a problem with is getting the lan settings correct. I can't seem to find any documentation on it, and when I look in the lan browsing configs, it looks about right to me. If anyone can give me a hand, please feel free to Email me. Much thanks.

Covie

by Tom Corbin (not verified)

The i386 packages are missing the kdenetwork
packages, which means that kmail isn't available.
The packages are there for RH 7. I can't seem
to get the source rpm to compile, does anyone
have a package I could use?